Sensuki

I don't have that problem. If there was a different animation for recovery time and combat idle I wouldn't even use the Combat HUDs.

Camera position not remembered on save/load (recognized by QA)

Saved the game with camera panned on an adventurer loaded the game and it centers on my PC expected result is to remember the position of the camera when I saved the game

The animation and the movement speed is better for combat. It's not about realism, it's about practicality.

Running in combat sucks, and the run animation blends badly with the combat idle.

To be honest I'd prefer walking, but they are not going to change it.

Character models still jerk/microstutter often when walking (probably game hiccup microstutters, can see the fps flunctuation) and they move like a droid army. I have requested that a tiny random delay be added to movement to fix this, but no dice. Can kinda guess why - because of the derpy engagement system.

The reason is because per-hit damage is very high in a lot of cases, it's never really been to do with action speed.

I have over 120 hours in this game, and I only speak from practical examples. Maps are small, pathing space is usually limited and the current enemy AI usually target the same unit, so they are often if not always close together. Encounters don't go for very long and AoE disables are usually cast by Priests, Druids and Wizards from the back and AoE disable spells have small AoEs. One of the only encounters with "squishies at the back" is the Dragon Egg fight and I have never seen the use of anything remotely to do with disengaging in that fight.

I enjoy moving in combat, but it sucks in Pillars of Eternity, standing there and doing raw damage is always superior. The Chanter push back spell is a joke compared to the other good ones they can cast IMO.

Heal yourself. Stuff dies quickly in Pillars of Eternity, if something is disabled, chances are they will be dead by the time the effect ends.

Why would you pick Graceful Retreat which only gives you a bonus against disengagement attacks, when you could pick a talent that gives you a Deflection bonus always (such as Superior Deflection), rather than on disengagement attacks? Or even better, choose the Cautious Attack modal which gives +15 Deflection. The Graceful Retreat talent just makes me laugh . Wild Sprint gives you -20 Deflection so you'll probably get critted when disengaging Escape is okay, but since they nerfed the distance it's almost not worth investing in either. Unless you're roleplaying, just invest in actual useful talents and abilities that give you a bonus where you don't have to make a plausible/suboptimal play in combat to actually qualify for the bonus. EDIT: You can abuse the Cautious Attack modal a bit, pause and toggle it on when you see an enemy making an attack animation against you, and toggle it off when the attack ends

That's right, you can. However since prone, stunned and paralyzed units can't fight back and get huge penalties to defenses ... why on earth would you stop attacking them?

I am going to report the animation glitches as bugs, because they're present in the game anyway, they're just harder to reproduce.

Wasting advancement points just so you can disengage = Running away prone/paralyzed/stunned units in melee =

There will probably be one more before the end of the year.

Combat log needs to be switched with the character portraits or something so you can actually read it on the fly. Needs a filter so you can remove the usless lines. Lines per acion need to be optimized. No colors for anything except names would be fine with me. I have asked for less padding as well I would like to see the raw math in a lot of the attack information pasted rather than moused over too. Combat log doesn't by default, scroll you down to the latest info in combat atm which is annoying

The Infinity Engine was built for an RTS game called Battleground Infinity, before Feargus Urquhart organized a TSR deal for Baldur's Gate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Engine

Engagement is not really a part of tactical decision making in Pillars of Eternity. It forces you to put more emphasis on strategy and opening than reactive tactics, because it prevents many forms of movement based reactive tactics. You might say 'it makes them expensive', and the cost (spending character advancement points or sacrificing tactical and strategical health resources) simply isn't worth it, when you can just simply play around the system at no cost, instead. Dragon's breath is a ranged attack, which doesn't have anything to do with Melee Engagement Movement in combat is not jogging directly past a melee opponent. Combat itself is an abstraction. Pillars of Eternity actually does worse job at abstracting combat than the Infinity Engine games because they've tried to add too many 'realistic' things without considering the impact they have on combat (see run animation & speed). There is no reason why a melee enemy cannot smack you obeying the rules of real time when you run past him. If that melee unit is one of your characters, player input or auto-attack should determine whether he attacks an enemy running past, not an automatic system that gives him a free invisible hit. If you do a search, you will see me making a suggestion that the Paladin could have an AoE slow aura that slows the movement speed of enemies, that would be a good way to make the Paladin somewhat 'sticky' if Melee Engagement is removed. This is a very poor analogy.

Are you that man?

If you play the same was as you would with Engagement in, it does. If anything it adds to the gameplay. Like I said, I need to do more videos that thoroughly demonstrate what it adds and what the problems are and what needs fixing. I have already spoken about some of those things - attacks don't interact properly with moving targets and there are some animation blending issues among other things. Those things are actually present in the game with Engagement, but they're hard to reproduce. I've seen them occur sometimes even with it in.

There are some issues with various weapon attack animation interaction with moving targets, and the run animation doesn't blend correctly with the combat stance sometimes when chasing. Some programming and animation time will need to be spent on making it so that if your recovery time = 0 and you are in range of your target, your attack animation instantly plays. I'll be making a new thread showing where it doesn't work, and how to easily fix it.

Don't worry sir, I'm from the internet! Yeah there is, I haven't created a thread about the problems with engagement before. I've talked about them but not presented them for others to see. Your disapproval is noted, but no farks have been given. It's not. You may have a different definition of what a core mechanic is, and it's obvious that you have an attachment to the mechanic for some reason (but that's okay, some people do) but I removed it from the game by deleting a single method in the code and guess what? The game plays pretty much the same! Removing engagement will take less resources to make combat functional than attempting to fix it will. Engagement has nothing to do with reach weapons. Based on this statement you didn't read that section of my post you quoted properly. Read it again, multiple times if necessary. This is an argument tactic that many people who don't really care much about an Infinity Engine experience often fall back on. The Infinity Engine games did many things very well and Pillars of Eternity does many things worse currently. Where it does worse I am only asking for at the bare minimum what the Infinity Engine games did, if not something better. Nope. I have made several arguments against the opinion that real-time games need automatic systems derived from turn-based games that break the rules of real-time to penalize movement. Movement in itself is already an opportunity cost much of the time, and the Engagement system in Pillars of Eternity promotes simply not moving at all and playing around that. I am a player that plays as optimally as possible most of the time, and moving while engaged is never optimal. You can feel free to disagree, but I can think of many ways to abuse such a system and while it is theoretically possible that such a system could be developed, I don't even think Blizzard's pathfinding programmers would be able to implement it in four months. Tactical retreating is never free. Both melee and ranged enemies that are targeting the character of yours can still make attacks against that character in real time. A system that gives an invisible attack that breaks the rules of real-time is completely unnecessary. AoOs are a turn-based mechanic, and they should stay there. A) That's great that a lack of engagement works fantastically with the currently pretty-dumb AI, but I'd rather have a game with [i]good[/i] AI. If the AI actually handled engagement like a person would, and took advantage of opportunities to disengage and switch targets and such, would the removal of engagement [i]still[/i] be so splendid? It would be even better with good AI, actually. But for some reason people around here seem to think that good AI = enemies that target your backline. Enemies did this in the very earliest Pillars of Eternity builds if you opened combat with your Wizard etc ... and it was laughably easy to exploit. B) "You can just stop people with active abilities" isn't a very good argument, because that's kind of the point of the "problem" initially referenced by Josh. SINCE people could simply jog past your melee folk with impunity, the [i]only[/i] means you had of stopping them, or otherwise hindering them in any fashion, was the use of active abilities. "Crap... my melee guy is useless in preventing that orc from rushing my mage. Better burn a Web or something so that I can specifically deal with [i]that[/i] one guy before he gets to me." This is completely incorrect. In the Infinity Engine games you could employ positioning, movement, tactical blocking, tactical retreating, manipulation of the AI targeting clauses AND crowd control abilities. Pillars of Eternity's Melee Engagement solution is the polar opposite of this and gets it all backwards.

It's not a core design mechanic. Obviously I need to make more videos against mobs thare are not Medreth's encounter, but if you watched the one I already provided - the sky didn't fall. It looked the same. The Melee Engagement system is abusable by the player, promotes bad AI and removes tactical gameplay from the game. Removing it is only a good thing.

Baldur’s Gate was the first RPG I played on my PC and I really liked it because I felt at home with the RTS-style controls and mechanics. I’ve never really understood exactly why I enjoyed playing the Infinity Engine games over and over again until the last few years, but I believe it was because the combat plays like an RTS game. Not everyone takes advantage of some of the RTS-isms of the IE games but many players have and do. I believe this is one of the defining things that sets them apart from the rest of the isometric RTwP RPGs and makes their combat the most enjoyable. The reason I find it enjoyable is because it is extremely tactical, and my gaming history comprises of extremely tactical games – RTS games, DotA and competitive Call of Duty. Tactics essentially boils down to in the moment decision making. The identification that you need to make a choice, how quickly you decide what you’re going to do, and how effectively you carry out that decision. That was one of my key strengths as a Call of Duty player and all of my teammates will attest to that. Strategy on the other hand is more about your planning and decision making before you undertake an activity. Sometimes you need to change tactics in the middle of implementing a certain strategy in reaction to certain events. Despite the claims to the contrary, the Infinity Engine games promoted doing this. Several examples are interrupting spell casting, dispelling effects with abilities, items and spells, counterspelling, reactionary protection spells, changing targets in combat based on certain events, swapping items between characters, tactical blocking, tactical retreating, switching of enemy aggro and repositioning during an encounter to gain an advantage. Many players do these things subconsciously without even realizing and seem to overlook many of these actions when passing off the Infinity Engine game combat as boring, or they pass these actions off as tedious micromanagement. But the fact is that this style of gameplay sets the Infinity Engine games apart from all of the other fantasy RTwP RPGs in existence. Sure, there were exploits – many people found cheese tactics that they could abuse to bypass many of the encounters at the game. Players could combine metagamed web and cloudkill spams with rest-spamming and bypass much of the enjoyment that the encounters in the Infinity Engine games offered. Players could also endlessly kite enemies across the map with archers. Some of these tactics were even required to beat the game on Solo Insane. But the tactical depth was there if you played it fairly. I believe the Melee Engagement system basically removes all forms of the tactical decision making related to movement mentioned in the first paragraph, and many of the others have been removed or made less useful in Pillars of Eternity via other sorts of system design. I probably should have included this passage in the OP, but oh well.